On Media

Morning Reads: Face-off

Sarah Palin and former CBS Nightly News anchor Katie Couric will face off once again this Tuesday — only it’s an NBC-ABC ratings battle and not an interview filled with “gotcha” questions.

On Sunday, NBC’s “Today” show announced that Palin would co-host the morning program this Tuesday. “She’ll reveal a different side of her than you’ve seen before,” the “Today” website says of the Fox News contributor.

“The Mike Huckabee Show,” the radio show featuring the former Arkansas governor and onetime presidential hopeful that starts next Monday, is not merely another shot at liberal media elites. Conceived by Cumulus Media, the program is a shot at Clear Channel, the radio giant that distributes Rush Limbaugh’s show at the same time of day.

And it is not the only one. The radio station owner Cumulus is also creating a local traffic service, selling a morning show by Geraldo Rivera and seeking other hosts for other time slots — giving talk radio stations new alternatives to Clear Channel and making for a turbulent time in the radio business.

There’s no mistaking where Andy Lack feels Bloomberg LP is positioned versus its competitors. “We may be the last man standing,” says Lack, who oversees the news organization’s multimedia operations.

A veteran of network television, Lack sits in his small office in Bloomberg’s gleaming New York headquarters, which is stocked with signs of the company’s largesse: expensive artwork, oversized fish tanks, a state-of-the-art TV studio. “Most of the other news organizations I’ve worked at are fighting the delusion factor,” says the former news executive for both CBS and NBC. “There’s enormous pressure of economics on journalism. It’s an expensive, tough game to be in.”

We hear the Fox News CEO is helping conservative writer Zev Chafets fast-track a book about Ailes’ and the “Fair and Balanced” cable-news network because he’s worried about the exhaustively reported book that New York magazine contributing editor Gabriel Sherman is writing on the same subject.

Media insiders tell us Fox News has granted extensive access to Chafets, who’s rushing to write a book about Fox News and Ailes that Penguin’s conservative Sentinel imprint will publish in the fall. Sherman’s book is not due until 2013.

Geraldo Rivera, who drew a storm of criticism for arguing on the air that Trayvon Martin was shot and killed because he was wearing a hoodie, apologized to the teen’s parents on Sunday, saying, “I never intended to hurt your feelings.”

“A week ago, I ranted against hoodies like the one worn by Trayvon on the evening he was shot dead by George Zimmerman because in Zimmerman’s words, ‘Trayvon looked like he was up to no good.’ I said then that Trayvon’s hoodie killed him as surely as George Zimmerman did,” Rivera told Martin’s parents, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, on his Fox News show “Geraldo At Large.”

NBC announced on Saturday that it would launch an internal investigation into a misleadingly edited 911 call that aired on the network which featuring George Zimmerman on the night that Trayvon Martin was shot.

The edited call which aired on NBC’s Today on March 27 featured Zimmerman talking to a 911 dispatcher. “This guy looks like he’s up to no good … he looks black,” Zimmerman said in the edited segment.

Emmy-winning journalist and television host Barbara Walters will be the speaker at this year’s Class Day, according to an email sent to the senior class early Monday morning.

“We are absolutely thrilled and thankful to Ms. Walters for agreeing to join us for Class Day,” Senior Class Council heads Kevin Adkisson ’12 and Ben Schenkel ’12 wrote in the email. “She has arguably interviewed more statesmen and stars than any journalist in history. The ABC News correspondent is so well-known that she is listed in the American Heritage Dictionary.”